Chapter 20 #2
‘Is the shop really not doing so well?’ Mum asked softly. ‘Do you need some money?’
‘No! No, I don’t want… I don’t know, maybe I should stick it out. See it through, you know?’ I sniffed. ‘Giving up just because it’s hard… I’d only be making it one hundred per cent my fault that it folded. At least if I try, I’ll know it wasn’t down to me not making an effort.’
‘So…’ Mum said carefully. ‘Are you thinking about… giving him another chance? Putting the work in to forgive him?’
Just like that, the shop – my business – was waved aside.
Mum had tunnel vision on my love life. The thing was, I hadn’t been thinking about forgiving Richard.
But sitting with her, talking about it, I was starting to wonder if that was exactly what I needed to do.
Everything was falling apart and it had all started when I broke up with Richard.
Had I binned off three years of my life and potentially left myself homeless and the owner of a failing business because I was too rigid to see that he was sorry?
He’d brought me flowers after all and hadn’t snapped at Emma when she was (rightfully) mean to him.
He’d been trying to win me back – talking to me, cleaning up after himself at the flat, trying to still give me money for shopping – and I’d been throwing it back at him out of anger.
But was I really perfect? All right, so I hadn’t cheated but I also hadn’t really listened to any of his opinions about the inheritance money.
Instead of setting up a joint business, I’d put it all into the shop and then basically ignored him for months while I worked on that.
I took a deep breath. ‘I keep thinking about how you always used to tell me I expect too much of people – like, remember when I stopped being friends with Chelsea Walker in middle school?’
‘Because she stole your pink gel pen,’ Mum nodded, looking amused. ‘I remember.’
‘It wasn’t that she stole it. It’s that she just refused to admit she had.
I mean, it was clearly mine, it was the same brand as all my pens and she only had the one of that kind.
It was the same level of gel…’ I cut myself off because this was well-worn ground.
I’d been annoyed about it since I was ten.
‘It wasn’t that she took it. It’s that she was so obviously lying and she just expected me to let it go. ’
‘I remember the fallout from that one. You two didn’t speak for three weeks,’ Mum sighed. ‘But you made up in the end, didn’t you? At the summer hog roast? I think because you realised it was just a silly little thing. It wasn’t worth your entire friendship.’
I sighed. ‘Yeah, we did make up. And then two years later she found out Jamie liked me, and she wanted to go out with him instead, so she told everyone I was a lesbian.’
‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with being a lesbian,’ Mum said. ‘So that says more about her than about you.’
‘I know there’s nothing wrong with…’ I sighed, frustrated.
Especially given that my mother had never acknowledged the fact that her own sister was gay.
‘The point is, I forgave her for the first lie and then she told an even bigger one to get what she wanted. And then I got bullied by idiots over something that wasn’t even true, and she went out with Jamie and ghosted me.
’ I screwed the tissue up into a ball and crushed it in one hand.
‘What if I forgive Richard for a “one-time mistake” and next time he lets me down even worse? What if we get married and have kids…’ I felt Mum twitch slightly like she was suppressing an excited fist-pump.
‘… and then he just walks out on me with someone else, leaving me looking like an even bigger fool than I do right now?’
I looked up and saw Mum nibbling her lip, gazing sideways at Dad’s empty armchair (also hideously bright cyan with a Mongolian sheepskin cushion on it). She looked, for the first time since I’d arrived, kind of perturbed.
‘Mum?’ I asked, sensing something was off with her. Normally she was full of soothing platitudes, so long as she wasn’t the cause of the upset. But right now, she was worryingly silent. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
Mum’s eyes flew back to me and she looked a little wide-eyed and helpless. A fluffy bunny caught in the headlights. I’d never known her to be lost for words before.
‘Sweetie…’ she said eventually, ‘I want to tell you something, and you have to promise me, that you won’t let it… that you will try and understand. Okay?’
‘… Okay?’ I said, warily. Was she about to admit that she knew the sofa was blindingly awful and had done this entire time? Was she colour-blind? Because that would explain some things.
Mum took a deep breath. ‘When we were first going out, your dad and I, long, long, before we were married and had you… your father cheated on me.’
My heart felt like it was being clenched in a fist. ‘Dad cheated on you? With who? When? How long have you known about it?’
Mum held up her hands, cutting off my questions. ‘Like I said, it was a very long time ago, and I don’t want you to hold it against him, because we were very young, he was very sorry and I forgave him. It doesn’t matter any more.’
‘It does to me! I can’t believe he’d do that,’ I said, skin crawling in horror. ‘He’s… Dad.’
Mum laughed. ‘He wasn’t always “Dad”, honey.
Anyway, it was a few weeks after we started going out together and he went drinking with his friends.
One thing led to another and they ended up at a house party…
and he slept with someone else. I was furious and your dad was mortified… but after a while I forgave him.’
‘Why?’ I asked, trying to make this information match up with what I knew of my dad. My tool-hoarding, parking-charge-protesting dad. ‘I mean, how could you forgive him? That’s… unforgivable,’ I finished lamely.
‘I know it probably seems that way. But, in the end, I decided that I believed he was sorry and that when he said it would never happen again, he was telling the truth.’ Mum shrugged, like it was just that easy.
‘After the anger fizzled out… I realised I missed him. That I was just making myself miserable for the sake of being “right” and that maybe someday, years down the line, we’d be married and have a wonderful daughter…
and that one night wouldn’t mean anything compared with that. ’
There was a lump in my throat as she looked at me.
I could see she meant it. It wasn’t just a story for my benefit, to convince me to give Richard another shot.
Mum genuinely believed – knew – that she had made the right decision.
That her marriage and her life with Dad was worth swallowing her pride over his one mistake and giving him a second chance.
‘And you’ve never… regretted it?’ I asked.
‘He’s never given me a reason to,’ Mum said firmly.
‘In all the years we’ve been married, he’s never so much as looked at anyone else.
I think he was so scared of losing me that, when I took him back, he couldn’t believe his luck.
I think he realised once he’d lost me, for those few days, the value of what he had.
’ She smiled slightly. ‘Not to toot my own horn, of course.’
I laughed, but sobered quickly. ‘I’m just… what if he’s another Chelsea, instead of another Dad? What if he makes me look stupid?’
Mum covered my hand with her own, her engagement ring and wedding band warm against my skin.
‘You weren’t stupid to trust Chelsea again.
She was an idiot for betraying your trust and losing you as a friend.
So if you do decide to give Richard a second chance and he wastes his last shot with you, he’s the idiot – not you.
Don’t let the fear of disappointment keep you from believing in people, sweetie. No one’s perfect.’
‘I know,’ I said, and I thought of Cooper – who’d rescued me from the canal and charmed me, only to turn so cold and distant the second I asked a question he didn’t like. ‘I suppose you never really know what someone’ll do if you give them a chance.’
‘Exactly.’ Mum smiled softly. ‘All you can do is wait and see what they’ll do with it.’